LogEDL: Log Anomaly Detection via Evidential Deep Learning

With advancements in digital technologies such as 5G communications, big data, and cloud computing, the components of network operation systems have become increasingly complex, significantly complicating system monitoring and maintenance. Correspondingly, automated log anomaly detection has become a crucial means to ensure stable network operation and protect networks from malicious attacks or failures. Conventional machine learning and deep learning methods assume consistent distributions between the training and testing data, adhering to a closed-set recognition paradigm. Nevertheless, in realistic scenarios, systems may encounter new anomalies that were not present in the training data, especially in log anomaly detection. Inspired by evidential learning, we propose a novel anomaly detector called LogEDL, which supervises the training of the model through an evidential loss function. Unlike traditional loss functions, the evidential loss function not only focuses on correct classification but also quantifies the uncertainty of predictions. This enhances the robustness and accuracy of the model in handling anomaly detection tasks while achieving functionality similar to open-set recognition. To evaluate the proposed LogEDL method, we conduct extensive experiments on three datasets, i.e., HDFS, BGL, and Thunderbird, to detect anomalous log sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LogEDL achieves state-of-the-art performance in anomaly detection.